Opening Day for Postgres Vision 2018

Yesterday, we kicked off Postgres Vision 2018, the enterprise Postgres event, in Cambridge, MA. This 3rd annual event is at the Royal Sonesta hotel and brings together the Postgres business, technical, and open source community. 

In the opening keynote delivered by Ed Boyajian of EnterpriseDB, he discussed the opportunity of running Postgres everywhere and encouraged people to embrace complexity in the age of the cloud. He recommended that enterprises build a bridge from short term projects to long term strategy and depend on experts as a resource to effectively scale their efforts. Ed’s talk featured a case study delivered by Joe Schuler, Vice President of Mastercard, and I offered a preview of EDB’s cloud-based Migration Tool Kit, as well. 

The audience then heard from Lauren Nelson, Principal Analyst at Forrester. Her research has revealed that people are moving complex, mission critical applications to public cloud environments, but this is not an easy task.

She discussed a series of decisions that organizations need to make to migrate data to the cloud and tips for prioritizing applications. Lauren cautioned that the hardest part of new technology is not the technology itself, but actually getting people to change, as it is so much more comfortable to continue on with what you are already doing. 

Lauren’s session was followed by Rob Thomas, General Manager, IBM Analytics. Rob discussed how artificial intelligence relates to IBM’s commitment and investments around Postgres. He said that AI will not replace managers, but predicted that managers that use AI will replace managers that do not. (View his presentation to the right.)

One of the most talked about presentations of the day was delivered by EDB’s own Ken Rugg, Chief Product and Strategy Officer. Ken presented his unique insights on the changing role of the DBA in the age of the cloud. He said DBAs were once the gateway to all things database related for enterprises. However, with the advent of the cloud, automation and DevOps, he sees the DBA’s role and responsibilities now rapidly evolving. Ken shared the ten most significant ways the role of the DBA has changed and what new, higher value skills he believes DBAs will need be ready for epic change. (View his presentation below.)

The technical sessions in the afternoon illustrated how to get from 'zero to cloud' in 60 minutes, the promise of zHeap to end vacuum, PostGIS, Postgres WAL files, modernizing legacy, and customer and partner applications of EDB Postgres.

The day’s presentations where capped off with a hilarious and engaging talk from Dan Lyons, author of Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs and Disrupted: My Misadventure In the Start-Up Bubble.

Day Two of Postgres Vision kicks off early Wednesday morning. Stay tuned for more news from Postgres Vision 2018.

Marc Linster, Ph.D., is the Senior Vice President of Product Development at EnterpriseDB.